ASSISTED DYING FEARS
T he newest slippery-slope concern about assisted dying in Canada has surfaced, and it should be dismissed as pure fearmongering. That concern centres around the fear that if a law is drafted in this country — now that the Supreme Court of Canada has struck down the ban on assisted dying — that people will be hurried toward death so their organs can be donated. Nonsense. First, to conjure up scenarios based on the speculative existence of a law that has not been drafted, and therefore whose wording, safeguards and other features remain completely unknown, is ludicrous. Second, the Supreme Court laid out language in its ruling that contained some parameters to be used in a future law. One is that an individual must be suffering from a “grievous and irremediable” condition, and another is that this condition must cause “endless suffering,” physically or psychologically.
Those who are terminally ill with cancer would never be considered for organ donation, for obvious reasons.
As Health Canada states, the health of the potential donor’s organs and tissues is even more important than the donor’s age. Other illnesses, both terminal and non-terminal, would also preclude organ donation — anyone suffering, in the court’s words, from a “grievous and irremediable” condition, would for a variety of reasons and circumstances, be a highly unlikely candidate for organ donation.
Alberta Health spells out the situation quite plainly: “... there may be specific reasons a person is unable to donate. These reasons are often related to a person’s medical or social history or certain illnesses they may have. Ultimately, the organs and tissues have to be healthy and the donor must be free from diseases that could potentially be harmful to the recipient.”
Typically, a person whose organs and tissues are healthy is going about his or her daily business, and not nearing the end of life.
Moreover, there is a small window of opportunity after death when organ donation can be made, and the organs of someone who chooses assisted dying at home might no longer be usable by the time the body gets to the hospital.
A carefully crafted law on assisted dying would also need to address issues of consent, making the procedures for obtaining consent strict enough, and the hurdles needing to be jumped high enough, that there would be no doubt the decision was solely the patient’s own, and that nobody was pushing him or her to speed things up for the dubious availability of the patient’s organs.
Time to let the fearmongering alone.